Just two weeks after inviting the American public to “chat” about her bottomless powerlust, Hillary Clinton has already broken her first campaign promise.

At the Democratic National Committee’s winter meeting last Friday, Hillary Clinton made her newest, most left-wing statement on Iraq. Goaded on by – and trying to drown out – protestors from Code Pink and Iraq Veterans Against the War, Hillary pledged: “If we in Congress don’t end this war before January 2009, as president, I will.”

And thus she continued the grand tradition of Clintons lying to the public. Last June, Hillary told the 2006 “Take Back America” conference – including a crowd of Code Pink protestors – that while “[t]here must be a plan that will begin to bring our troops home,” she did “not think it is a smart strategy either for the president to continue with his open-ended commitment which I think does not put enough pressure on the Iraqi government, nor do I think it is a smart policy to set a date certain.” Now she has set a “date certain”: January 20, 2009. If her party and occasional Republican McGoverns have not successfully eroded public support of the troops, she will pull the plug.

Never content to sit by and bake cookies, she has a plan to securing U.S. defeat on the installment plan. The media report: “Clinton has her own plan for Iraq, which would cap troop levels in the war-torn nation, and has threatened to work to cut off funding for the Iraqi army, unless Iraqi leaders take responsibility for quelling violence.” Hillary is asking America to believe that the best way for al-Maliki to fight off terrorism is to give him progressively fewer resources with which to accomplish this end. As the president tries to send in the cavalry, she pulls tightly on the reins.

The moonbats at such leftist blogdom (blog-dumb?) mainstays as Democratic Underground love her leftward (rhetorical) turn, including apparent regret over sanctioning the war.

She purred to the DNC Friday, “I want to be very clear about this: If I had been president in October 2002, I would not have started this war.” But she did start the war, with her vote for HJR114, “A joint resolution to authorizethe use of United States Armed Forcesagainst Iraq.” This is the kind of authorization of military force her husband never sought (and perhaps couldn’t have obtained) while aiding the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army in Serbia. Indeed, Operation Iraqi Freedom would have been unnecessary had her husband “let the UN inspectors do their job” by insisting Saddam readmit them into the country after his defiant expulsion in 1998.

Shrillary now shrieks the president “misused” her vote, but the record is clear: while casting October 2002, she declared on the Senate floor, “I want this president, or any future president, to be in the strongest possible position to lead our country in the United Nations orin war.” She concluded hers was “a vote that says clearly to Saddam Hussein – this is your last chance – disarm or be disarmed.” Saddam Hussein promptly produced a joke of a report, indicating no compliance in his UN-mandated disarmament, terminated the ceasefire, and invited an invasion (which “rush to war” began the following spring).

In 2003, she shed additional light on her decision making process, saying, “I ended up voting for the resolution after carefully reviewing the information, intelligence that I had available, talking with people whose opinions I trusted, trying to discount the political or other factors that I didn't believe should be in any way part of this decision” (naturally). She has indicated former Clinton administration officials corroborated Bush’s assessment of the threat Iraq posed to the United States and the region.

Faced with her public statements, one is forced to convinced, by her own reasoning process, she would have launched this war. Like JFK’s advisors in Vietnam, she now seeks to leave the president holding the bag, as she inches closer toward Jack Murtha.

Leftist commentators have likened Hillary’s pledge to end the war upon inauguration to the Republican campaigns of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. (The fact that troops are still stationed in South Korea is apparently lost on them.) Ike and Nixon campaigned for peace – as would any sane candidate – but neither set an exit date for an ongoing war. In the waning days of the 1952 election, Eisenhower told the nation:

Now, where will a new administration begin? It will begin with its president taking a firm, simple resolution. That resolution will be to forego the diversions of politics and to concentrate on the job of ending the Korean War, until that job is honorably done. (Emphasis added.)

Nixon, too, pledged “peace with honor.” “Honor” is the difference between Eisenhower in ’52 or Nixon in ‘68 and Sen. Clinton forty years hence. The Democrats’ abandonment of South Vietnam dropped American prestige to new lows (before bottoming out under Jimmy Carter, who was more threatened by the number of Jews on the Holocaust Museum Board than by Brezhnev or Khomeini). Hers is a party that seeks withdrawal for withdrawal’s sake – before the American military secures an American objective or even prevents a dedicated enemy that has already killed thousands of Blue State Americans from making the oil-rich nation in question its next base of operations. But such is the outlook of her party’s primary voters, and she’s “in it to win it.”

The mainstream media will not explore the tension between vowing not to set a “date certain” in June and setting a date in February, anymore than they held Hillary accountable for declaring the Bush administration “wanted to turn the clock back the progress of the 20th century” and “came to town to reinstitute a 19th century attitude.” (“Senator Clinton, is it true you said the Bush administration wants to repeal light bulbs?”) The nation may conclude, however, that positions reveal a shrewd calculation governed only by her self-seeking ambition – am ambition she is willing to indulge at the cost of 100,000 American soldiers and millions of Iraqis, now or on Inauguration Day 2009.

In time, Hillary may leapfrog Dennis Kucinich as the terrorists’ favorite presidential candidate. At present, the terrorists’ best hope is clear: ratchet up the killing and support the Democrats.

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